History refuses to cooperate with Obama in the Middle East

The Washington Post rarely delivers great news to my door step. Today is an exception, although it’s not clear that the Post recognizes it as such.

Here’s the Post’s lead headline: “Egypt’s Muslim Brotherhood appears at risk of falling apart.” And here’s the opening paragraph of the story by Liz Sly and Mary Beth Sheridan:

The world’s most influential Islamist movement is in danger of collapse in the land of its birth — its leaders imprisoned, its supporters slain and its activists branded as terrorists in what many are describing as the worst crisis to confront Egypt’s 85-year-old Muslim Brotherhood.

This is enough to make my day, but it gets better:

Meanwhile, the movement is battling a level of popular hostility perhaps unprecedented in its history. The Brotherhood’s strategy of confronting the government with sit-ins and marches in recent weeks seems only to have inflamed public opinion.

It’s one thing, and a good thing, for the military to be routing Islamofascists. It’s another thing, and a brilliant thing, if the Egyptian public has turned against them.

There will be more twists and turns in this saga, and some of the them undoubtedly will be unhappy. But if you can’t find the good in the current rout of the Muslim Brotherhood, then you may be on the wrong side.

Speaking of which, let’s note that the past seven years have produced two major instances in which an Arab population turned on Islamofascists — Iraq in 2007 and Egypt this year. In both case, Barack Obama took positions that made (or would have made) these outcomes unlikely.

The Sunni awakening against al Qaeda was made probable by the U.S. troop surge, which Obama strongly opposed. And Obama opposed the ouster, and subsequent routing, of the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt.

President Obama styles himself as a man on the right side of history. But the history he thinks he’s on the right side of is a leftist, “liberationist,” and classically anti-American narrative. When events refuse to cooperate with that narrative, Obama is adrift.

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